Nassib Bundo

Nassib Bundo (also Bunda or Buunde ; * in the 19th century; † 1906 in Mogadishu ) was a former slave in Somalia from the Yao people . He was an important leader in the Gosha area in the lower Jubba Valley , which was populated by former slaves from various ethnic groups. Their descendants have been known as Somali Bantu since the 1990s .

Life

There are different oral traditions in the Gosha about the origin and life of the Nassib Bundo. According to one version, he was the slave of a Somali cattle herder from whom he ran away. Descendants of slaves from the Zigula people , however, say that a Zigula named Bundo found him as a baby, adopted him and named him Nassib . As an adult he strived for power, which the Zigula denied him, whereupon he went back to the Yao, the people of his birth parents. According to another version, recorded in an Italian source, he found hidden ivory , told his master about it, and was released for his allegiance thereby demonstrated.

According to other sources, he was born under the name Makanjira in the Yao area in northern Mozambique in the 1830s . At the age of about 20 he was captured in an attack by "the warriors of Tippu-Tip ", shipped to Somalia and sold to Somali by the Ogadeni- Darod clan near Baraawe . After attempting to escape, he was beaten and left to die, but a sheik from the Tunni clan saved him and later released him. As a result, Nassib Bundo went to the Gosha area inhabited by runaway and released slaves, first wanted to settle in the existing Hindi village , but then founded his own settlement.

In the 1870s, Nassib Bundo began to gain political importance by participating in the battles against the hunters and gatherers of the Boni and in 1875/76 in negotiations with an Egyptian expedition appeared as a leader of the Gosha residents. The Egyptians were initially unsure whether they should consider him or the Makua Farahan Makua as head of the Gosha, but Farahan Makua was killed, possibly at Nassib Bundo's initiative. Within the Gosha, Nassib Bundo prevailed against other rivals such as the Zigula Makoma Maligo and the Ngindo Songollo Mafula . By 1885, Nassib Bundo was recognized as the head of several villages. He established a "Goshaland Sultanate" as a political and military unit of several villages and was recognized as a "Sultan" by Zanzibar and later also by the advancing European colonial powers. With the help of firearms acquired through trade with Zanzibar, the Gosha residents under his leadership succeeded in defeating the Ogadeni-Darod in 1890. These had previously traded with the former slaves, but also repeatedly raided villages. With parts of the nomadic Somali clans of the Biimal and Sheekhaal, however, he agreed not to accept slaves who had run away from them in his villages; he might even refund some of them to her.

To consolidate his power, Nassib Bundo combined Islamic and traditional African mysticism. In tradition, he is said to have supernatural abilities, such as the fact that he was able to use wild animals for his benefit. He is said to have sent the crocodiles of the Jubba River against his rivals within the Gosha, and he threatened heads of families who refused to give him their daughters. He is said to have demanded virgins as tribute from the villages under his control, and he is said to have claimed a substantial part of the existing wealth for himself.

The colonial powers Great Britain and Italy, which invaded the area around 1890, both tried to secure the support of Nassib Bundo by offering him a scholarship. Nassib Bundo, however, remained suspicious of them and was particularly anxious to maintain his position within the Gosha. Around 1903 he is said to have had correspondence with Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, who led an uprising against the colonizers in northern Somalia and was looking for allies in the south. After all, it was other Gosha leaders - including his own son - who complained to the Italians about his rule. Nassib Bundo was arrested and died in 1906 in a Mogadishu prison of old age and illness.

reception

Nassib Bundo's death was mentioned in a poem by a Somali from Hobyo , which shows how far his fame had gone during his lifetime.

During the fascist rule in Italy he was sometimes stylized as the "African Spartacus ", and the Italian author Ugo Bargoni wrote a novel about him in 1931 ( Nel regno di Nassib Bundo. Lo Spartaco della Somalia Italiana ). When Somalia gained independence in 1960, Nassib Bundo was named by the Somali Youth League as one of the country's anti-colonial heroes.

In the Gosha one remembers on the one hand the tyrannical behavior of Nassib Bundo, on the other hand he is revered as a hero, especially because of the important victory against the Ogadeni.

See also

• Somali Bantu

swell

• Lee V. Cassanelli: Lee V. Cassanelli: Social Construction on the Somali Frontier: Bantu Former Slave Communities , in: Igor Kopytoff (Ed.): The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies , 1987, ISBN 0-253-30252 -8 (pp. 226–231)
• Francesca Declich: Multiple Oral Traditions and Ethno-Historical Issues among the Gosha: Three Examples ( PDF )
• Francesca Declich: "Gendered Narratives," History, and Identity: Two Centuries along the Juba River among the Zigula and Shanbara , in: History in Africa, Vol. 22 (1995), pp. 93-122
• Catherine Besteman: Unraveling Somalia - Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery , University of Pennsylvania Press 1999, ISBN 978-0812216882 (pp. 64–66)

Individual evidence:

1. ↑ cf. the corresponding spelling on somalibantu.com: [1]
2. ↑ ^{a b} Declich, Multiple Oral Traditions
3. ↑ Francesca Declich: Identity, Dance and Islam among People with Bantu Origins in Riverine Areas of Somalia , in: Ali Jimale Ahmed (Ed.): The Invention of Somalia , Red Sea Press 1995, ISBN 978-0932415998 (p. 231, annotation 10)
4. ↑ Besteman 1999: p. 65
5. ↑ December 1995 (on causes of death)